Pay per use remailers and remailer reliability tracking.

[Tim May]

I strongly endorse this post. It says things I have been planning to put 
into a post.

A few comments, but the original left unsnipped so it can be read in 
full as part of my post.

On Friday, December 21, 2001, at 08:42 PM, jamesd at echeque.com wrote:

>     --
> On 20 Dec 2001, at 21:00, Steve Schear wrote:
>> We should all be ashamed.  The main reason we don't have
>> the private payment system many have discussed is
>> lazyness/"better things to do with their time" by those
>> with the technical ability to create the SW (if I were one
>> of them the SW would be done by now, as I've easily spent
>> 1-2 many years and $10Ks trying to get others to write the
>> code).  Funding the payment system, as Tim has noted, is
>> not that hard.
>
> I have been working on this project for several years, and
> have not got much done.  It is a big project, to do it right,
> with a user interface that is going to be reasonably usable
> and intelligible for a casual user,  I would say it is about
> eighteen months full time work if done at home, and if done
> as a dot com business, a couple of million dollars.

This sounds about right. Pr0duct Cypher, whoever he was/is, gave us a 
crude form of digital cash almost 9 years ago. Chaum had a team of N 
(probably 3-8 at any given time, over 10+ years) working on various 
levels of digital cash implementation. However, Chaum was hobbled in 
various ways, and a smaller team could probably do it.

Why don't certain indviduals, like moi, fund digital cash? Several 
reasons:

1. As James notes, a dot com business would consume a few million 
dollars. Absent a concrete business plan, and funded only by the funder, 
this would mean about twice that in stocks and investments would have to 
be sold to fund the "few million dollars" to (maybe) complete the 
project.

2. Even with a few million in dot com funds, or several million in 
investments liquidated to generate the few million, no guarantee of 
success. Besides the fact that Chaum's company apparently spent upwards 
of ten million dollars, nothing significant came out of it (and he had 
all the patents, all the cachet). I watched the Xanadu and AMIX groups 
spend a huge amount of money. Fine people, moslty, but they missed the 
boat. (Had some person liquidated $15 million in order to fund a $7 
million Xanadu effort, I'd say they have a right to be pissed that 
little came out of it except some joking business cards reading "Chief 
Ontologist and Bottle Washer" and things like that. Don't get me wrong: 
a lot of the Xanadu and AMIX folks are my friends, but I watched them 
blow throw many millions of dollars in salaries and rentals and office 
space with almost nothing to show for it.)

(Side Note: And then there's ZKS, which apparently (according to 
estimates I have read) raised upwards of $60 million. A staff of 200 at 
one point, with latte and chai bars and hot tubs and all the rest of the 
dot.com shtick. And now, what? They tried reinventing themselves as some 
soft of "privacy consulting" firm. Maybe a few bucks in that, but I 
expect most of that $60 million has evaporated. And for individual  
investors, it would take liquidating and paying taxes on $100 million in 
assets to raise this amount of investment capital...)

3. Anyone funding this kind of effort had better do it very anonymously. 
Big Brother is constantly expanding the boundaries of the conspiracy 
laws, and the civil courts will also be called on to avenge any 
financial losses by supposedly aggrieved rights holders. While I have no 
idea who "James Donald" really is, he'd better be even more untraceable 
than he is now if he introduces a system which can by any interpretation 
"aid the Evil Doers and do harm to the children."


>
> Doing it right requires a reasonably competent programmer,
> someone with experience in producing consumer products.  Such
> people tend to be busy.  I have kids to put through college.
> Because of the illegality of likely applications, this is not
> a project that bodes well for making a lot of money.

Way too much focus has been put on making money. Not that there is 
anything wrong with making money. But too many people have tended to 
think that if they have even a glimmering of an idea, that a start-up is 
the way to finance their explorations. Not surprisingly, most of these 
developmental companies have failed miserably.

(Useful to look at companies which have succeeded. Sun commercialized, 
with Stanford's permission and partial ownership, the Stanford 
University Network (SUN). Cisco commercialized some networking systems 
_also_ deployed at Stanford. A moral here. Ebay went after the 
low-hanging fruit of computerizing simple classified ads and adding 
auctions (even as my friends at AMIX had earlier been working on more 
sophisticated versions of Hayekian agoric markets...thus missing the Pez 
collectibles!))
>

> This project is the upper edge of what can be done by an
> enthusiast.  Having done it, then comes the scary part --
> deploying it.  No way can I deploy it -- I have too many
> assets.   Anyone that has the skills and time needed to
> create this is apt to have too many assets to himself deploy
> it.

This is my fear as well.

Even _donating_ to such a development effort can expose one's assets to 
seizure. (Pace the recent seizures of pro-Palestine contributors. In 
Amerika, your money is not really your own anymore.)

People with assets could flee the country, renounce, blah blah, and 
maybe, if the Feds let the assets escape the country, have the funds and 
the freedom to fund such an effort.

But what would they get? Only a handful of people seem to have the 
skills to independently develop digital cash.

The chances are very good that the effort would be by some people who 
really didn't know what they were doing, who spent their time shopping 
for Herman Miller chairs and espresso machines for the company 
entertainment pod, and who basically were drones.  We've seen it happen 
a dozen times.

Is there any hope at all?

Yes. The best work has always been done by one or two people at a time. 
This applies to software as well.  (Not so much to chips anymore, at 
least not for the past 20 years. Another topic.)

A person with the dedication and skill of a Stallman could probably 
implement digital cash without having the Herman Miller chairs, the hot 
tub up on the roof of the office building, the staff of marketdroids, 
and the espresso machines.

There's some hope.

--Tim May
"The State is the great fiction by which everyone seeks to live at the 
expense of everyone else." --Frederic Bastiat